Go Set a Watchman in the context of "Atticus Finch"

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist whose 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of modern American literature. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). An earlier draft of Mockingbird, set at a later date, Go Set a Watchman, was published in July 2015 as a sequel. A collection of her short stories and essays, The Land of Sweet Forever, was published on October 21, 2025.

The plot and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors in Monroeville, Alabama, as well as a childhood event that occurred near her hometown in 1936. The novel deals with racist attitudes and the irrationality of adult attitudes towards race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s as depicted through the eyes of two children.

The Land of Sweet Forever is a collection of short stories by American author Harper Lee, published posthumously on October 21, 2025, by HarperCollins. The book features eight previously unpublished short stories discovered after her 2016 death, in an apartment she owned in New York City. Eight additional pieces, which appeared in different publications between the years 1961 and 2006, are also included. The book's introduction is by Casey Cep, the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

The eight newly released stories were written after Lee dropped out of the University of Alabama School of Law and prior to the success of her novels Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird at a time when the young author was submitting short fiction pieces to publishing outlets. In 2024, her estate approved these stories for publication along with eight previously published pieces that were written after the acclaim of To Kill a Mockingbird, when Lee's subsequent work was more readily published.